I just sent my newsletter through a new email service. I wanted to tell you about it before I do much more with it.

It’s called 2Send. It’s from the folks at WPManageNinja — the same company behind FluentCRM and the whole Fluent suite. It’s not fully public yet, you’d need to request early access, but I’ve been using it and I’ve got some thoughts.

The Amazon SES Problem

If you’ve ever tried setting up Amazon SES, you know the deal. The pricing is incredible — basically nothing per email. But getting it working is a genuine ordeal. Sandbox mode, IAM credentials, DKIM setup, suppression list issues you can barely see let alone manage… it’s a lot. Many people start down that road and bail out halfway.

I’ve been through it. And even once it’s running, it’s not exactly low-maintenance.

So what 2Send does is sit on top of Amazon’s infrastructure, but they handle all the complexity. You don’t deal with Amazon directly. You deal with their clean management layer instead. Same cheap-ish pricing, none of the setup torture session.

The Pricing

$3 per 10,000 emails.

That’s the number. Compare that to Mailgun at around $15 for the same volume, Postmark at $16.50, SendGrid at even more. 2Send is a very different price point.

It’s more expensive than raw Amazon SES, yes. But you’re also not losing a week of your life trying to configure it. That’s a worthwhile trade for most people.

Getting It Connected

This is where it gets simple. Install FluentSMTP on your WordPress site — it’s free. There’s a built-in connector for 2Send. You grab your API key, paste it in, authenticate your domain with a couple of DNS records, and you’re done.

Domain authentication is standard everywhere. That part’s no different from anything else. But beyond that? It’s pretty much copy-paste.

A Look at the Backend

I walked through the dashboard in the video. Here’s what you’re looking at:

It runs on a credit system. I bought around $20 worth of credits and have been working through them. I’ve sent about 7,800 emails so far. My sending health score looks good. It tracks bounce rates, gives you domain-level metrics, and logs every outgoing email so you can verify exactly what went out and when.

That last part matters more than people realize. When someone says “I never got that email,” you can actually go look. With Amazon, you often couldn’t. Their suppression list was essentially opaque — getting someone off it was its own torture session.

With 2Send you can see the suppression list. You can see everything. The one missing piece right now: you can’t yet remove someone from the suppression list. I’ve reported that. This is still beta, so I expect it’ll show up. But it’s the thing I’d want to see fixed first.

The Agency Angle

This is where it gets interesting for me personally. 2Send has a teams feature. You set up a team per client, each one is completely self-contained — what one client does doesn’t affect another’s deliverability. But billing is centralized under the parent account (you).

The model makes sense. The execution is almost there.

What it needs — and what Postmark does better right now — is a simple “teams” view in the sidebar where you can see all your client accounts at a glance and jump into any one of them. Right now it’s a little bit buried. It’ll get there. And when it does, this becomes a genuinely compelling option for running email across a whole client base at a fraction of what Postmark costs.

One other thing: I’d call them “servers” rather than “teams.” That’s the Postmark terminology, and it’s more accurate — one per client, not one per actual team. Minor point, but terminology shapes usability.

How I’d Actually Use It

For most people watching this, 2Send for everything is probably the move. It’s cheap, it’s easy to set up, it works. Done.

If you’re running higher volume and you really love Postmark — and I do love Postmark, it’s fast, it’s reliable, it’s probably the best outgoing email service out there right now — here’s another option: use Postmark for transactional email only. Password resets, receipts, order confirmations. Then set up a second email address in FluentSMTP connected to 2Send for your broadcast campaigns. That way you’re paying Postmark’s premium rates only for the stuff where that speed and reliability really matters.

That only makes sense if you’re sending enough volume to feel the cost difference. If you’re not there yet, just use 2Send for everything and call it a day.

Where This Could Go

I’ll be honest — I think this should become the default email setup for xCloud sites. Install FluentSMTP, auto-connect to 2Send, done. No more Elastic Email as the default. This is a better option on basically every dimension.

It’s still early. The auto top-up feature isn’t there yet (I don’t want to manually watch credits and top up — I want it to just bill me when it hits a threshold). The agency view needs polish. But they’re 90% of the way there already.

Anyway, if you want to try it, go request early access. I’ll keep using it and report back as it develops.